Transcription
On this March 11th in a couple weeks, it will be 77 years since I bought my first stock. I paid one hundred and fourteen dollars and seventy five cents for three shares of City Service Preferred.
But if you had bought, if you had better pension fund, and you put a million dollars into the S&P 500 at that time and reinvested during my investing lifetime, that million would have turned into 5.3 billion. You have gotten, for every dollar you put in, over five thousand dollars without ever reading a headline, an annual report, or knowing accounting. You just had to believe in America, and you didn't have to pick the right stock; you just picked America.
I go back and I point out that there were 277-year periods before that, and that takes us back to George Washington getting inaugurated. There wasn't anything here then, and now you have a hundred and eight trillion dollars of household wealth in the United States.
You know, we've got something that works, and that framework wasn't that we were working harder; it wasn't that we were smarter, but we had a framework that unleashed human potential. Just think of that: 377-year periods, one of which I experienced. You couldn't help but all you had to do was believe in America. That worked the last 77 years.
But there's a question that came in to T29. This is from Scott Baker: “With so many people in the S&P index funds, is it still market neutral and the best investment vehicle for most people?”
Yeah, I think it's best, doesn't it? Because most people don't know how to pick stocks, and most of the time I don't know how to pick stocks. I mean, it is not an easy game, and by definition, people are going to do average. I believe if you take everybody and aggregate, if half of them are paying big fees and jumping around and paying brokers commissions, the other half have to do better.